Hayes was from the Pima tribe.

The specificity applied to the white survivors was a different kind of specificity than the generic racial category applied to Hayes.

This was not subtle, and it was not lost on Hayes.

He was being used as evidence that America’s war was a war for all its people — even, implicitly, its Indigenous people.

The image of a Pima Marine raising the flag alongside white Marines was powerful precisely because it seemed to transcend the racial divisions that still structured American life in 1945.

But the transcendence was symbolic, not real.